Meeting With Double Agent

Beatriz Olabarrieta constructs installations that look like collages – combining objects made of light and ductile materials with drawings and sound. These are realised in collaboration with others.

Meeting With a Double Agent questions “sensitivities” specific to certain stories and conflicts. It enriches the way we can evoke them through a physical incarnation in(habiting) places already charged with the story. It teases out the story’s persistence and resistance as well as its sensitivity and responsiveness. What the artist makes is the ghostly double of something in the real world, as if she perceives the world from a different, non-dominant perspective – from the place and space of the other.

The exhibition is a site for examining oblique perspectives between the artist’s position and those of different figures. It is in the particular sound and light elements that occupy the border between the individual and domestic domain, the invisible and the visible that the whole project converges. The bodies move through the exhibition, in a project that aggregates multiple objects and practices of questioning.

in residency: Beatriz Olabarrieta

2_10 – 30_11_2017

Beatriz Olabarrieta (Bilbao, SP) is an artist living and working in London. She graduated from Wimbledon School of Art in 2004 and the Royal College of Art in 2007. Olabarrieta constructs sculptural installations that combine objects made of lo-fi building materials with short looped video sequences. Her exhibitions are sites for examining and generating performance and writing; each configuration is a stage for open-ended scenarios to unfold.

The residency of Beatriz Olabarrieta is organised in collaboration with Emma.

Emma is a self-organised collaborative and curatorial organisation for artistic and cultural practices that encourages dialogue and exploration in the arts by creating learning and residential opportunities for artists and other cultural producers through diverse forms of presence such collective gatherings and presentations. Beatriz Olabarrieta is Emma’s artist fellow 2017.

DUMB BELLS. Saturdays Live. Serpentine Galleries. London, UK, 2016

DUMB BELLS. Saturdays Live. Serpentine Galleries. London, UK, 2016

DUMB BELLS. Saturdays Live. Serpentine Galleries. London, UK, 2016

POCKETFUL. Platform Residency at Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 2016

POCKETFUL. Platform Residency at Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 2016

POCKETFUL. Platform Residency at Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 2016

Project partners:

Golden Grain

Azar Alsharif & Pedro Henriques

Curator: Markéta Stará Condeixa

Exhibition opening: 6_7_2017 / 22.00

Exhibition dates: 7_7_2017 – 23_9_2017

We find ourselves ingrained in a realm of abstracted representations. A tangible reality as we once knew it, has been rendered obsolete. It has shifted towards a virtual comprehension of our surrounding; it has been altered into a landscape, which has been gradually virtualised and post produced into supposedly real images of who we are and what we might, or already have become. The world’s surface has been covered by layers of such images ? flickering, illuminated and continuously circulating similes that now appear to be the world’s exterior coat. Reality was lost in the digital and the dj’d archive of its past, as has the idea of the authentic image, object or the remix of a true self. Contemporary representations of the real topamax today, are representations of the equally non-real archival families of older and the already post produced depictions of initial objects/subjects, fabricated from the many times appropriated and the virtual, the reality of which, is now no longer at stake. “The tools of postproduction here are not made at achieving a representation of reality. They have become means of creating images and a world in their wake.”

Deep under the surface these images however still exist. Although archaic in form and in the singularity of their content, they now only endure as preconditions for their later becoming and transfigurations. Some have become new representations or backdrops, others have become victims of their own reconfiguration and translation, resulting in new hybridised settings or into three dimensional materialisations. It might feel dated. After all it is an exhibition of images, of representations and of small realities, the misplacement, replacement and transformation of which however, serves us as a tool, allowing us to question contemporary principles of representation, the abstraction of appearance and the speed of disappearance.

Some people believe art develops in a backstitch manner, in a one step back, two steps forward fashion. Starting from one point, the needle leads the thread one point back in direction of sewing, creating a loop through the back of the fabric and getting out one point forward from where it started. This technique is repeated again and again and allows the stitching line to be filled from both sides and thus endure better.

I remember my 80s from the 90s. Radio City 93,7 FM played only the biggest hits of the past ten years. With complete disregard to temporality, Queen were beating Natalia Imbruglia in the annual hit parade of 1997. The same year the first episode of Moonlighting from 1985 was premiered on TV. Not understanding any English at all, I remember my surprise when encountering the ruins of Radio City in the original Planet of Apes movie. Only after I understood why there is actually not strictly “my” City Radio and only after that, that those ruins were actually ruins of a famous New York building. Having no knowledge of English at all, I would imitate the lyrics based on my understanding and in my very own non-existent language. This same year the television premiered the first episode of Moonlighting from 1985. Despite the fact that I didn’t know how to play baseball and never before seen a single game, the object I terribly desired was a baseball glove. Now that I think of it, maybe it was because of that or maybe because this is how I knew it from the movies.

This exhibition is about different temporalities and about catching up with them. It deals with nostalgia towards something that never really existed. Maybe the 80s were more the 90s. Or maybe it all took place some years back and now its all in the past.

In the 80s the West still had its charm for being the West and for actualy being in the West and well, not everywhere. The skyscrapers were illuminated somewhat brighten during the night. When I first came to New York and Chicago, the places I knew so well – places that I was looking for, I could not find. There was nothing.

Michal Novotný

The Life and Death of the 80's, 2017, Installation view, Syntax, Photo: Bruno Lopes

The Life and Death of the 80's, 2017, Installation view, Syntax, Photo: Bruno Lopes

Midcentury Paradox

Adrian Dan

Exhibition opening: 3_3_2017 / 22.00

Exhibition dates: 4_3_2017 – 22_4_2017

An urge to visualise and scrutinise an imagined future has been tied with humans for centuries, may it be through the witchcraft of the crystal ball or on the contrary, through the somewhat more realistic assumptions of speculative fiction, the roots of which are in this case, grounded within an adequate knowledge of the real world. Looking back into the late nineteenth and the following twentieth century, where the multiplicity of imagined futures developed together with concepts of a speeding modernity, we are faced with an arena where the probable became gradually possible and the gap between the imagined and the lived, shifted from a diminishing distance to a greater proximity.

Time passing through images from present to future, is represented here in continuous motion and flux. It is confronted with the body – a familiar, stable and a measurable unit that becomes a filter and the scale for the imagination of an improbable, yet surprisingly possible future. A future where the body commemorates its organic form, on a quest towards a robotic upcoming that has long been rooted in the already lived of the day.

With the disruption in the understanding of the body as something strictly organic, the body similarly to the revision of the spatiotemporal becomes fragmented. It is no longer perceived as a singular form, but rather as an operational system, constructed from replaceable components, industrially produced (body) parts. While the idea behind modernity’s industrialisation was progress towards a better life, our future visions take a turn towards a non-life. Still far away from the upcoming midcentury, we are already living visions of our own future paradox.

Marketa Stará Condeixa

Adrian Dan (1985) is one of the leading artist of his generation in Romania. Currently based between Bucharest and London his recent exhibitions include Kunstlich Naturlich at Sabot Gallery (Cluj-Napoca), Muscle Breach at Suprainfinit Gallery (Bucharest) and Nicodim Gallery (Los Angeles/Buchares) among other. He has previously shown in Madrid(CA2M), Paris (Palais de Beaux-Arts) and Brussels. In 2015 Adrian has been a researcher in residence in Marfa, Texas, as part of the Fieldwork Marfa program. His exhibition at Syntax is the first presentation of the artists work in Portugal.